Russia: The Awful Truth

...However, his long reign was "framed" by the tragedies in Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan...

...In describing the last three decades, Volkogonov also drew on his personal observations, initially as a top Army political commissar, of the Kremlin leaders...

...In some respects, he came close to succeeding...

...For example, while the general staff advised correctly that Hitler's main thrust would be aimed at Moscow, Stalin (recalling World War I) insisted that Hitler would drive south, so 25 divisions were transferred there from the central front...

...The initial programs proposed under perestroika went nowhere...

...Antony's College, Oxford, who translated and edited the book...

...Aides complained that Gorbachev, obsessed with his own image, never listened to people...

...We shall return to terror and to economic terror...

...At first, he confesses, he thought that would be unwise...

...notarized deeds of land-ownership, factories, buildings, and so on and so forth...

...To be sure, much of the new material confirms, clarifies or explicates what was previously suspected by Western researchers and/or disclosed in other documents and memoirs published in the last decade...

...Prepare for this in secret, without publicity...

...The legend of Stalin as a great war leader is deflated...

...Some 26,452,000 Soviet citizens (more than half civilians) died in World War II...

...Volkogonov offers many examples of Gorbachev's continued devotion to Lenin and "the Party" later and later in the game...

...Nevertheless, the author recognizes that Gorbachev's contribution to reducing the threat of nuclear war was immense...

...Lenin's radical utopianism is one of them...

...two flawed reformers, Nikita S. Khrushchev and Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...But most often the flavor of the original dialogues is more pungent and revealing than previously published paraphrases...

...There is also interesting medical information on the various leaders at different times in their lives...

...Quite a few disclosures are altogether new...

...To previous disclosures of Lenin's role in the murder of the Imperial family, the author adds Lenin's telegraphed instructions for the murder of the White leader, Admiral Kolchak, and other instructions to send hostages to the civil war front "with machine guns at their back...

...the Cuban missile crisis...

...Here are his summary casualty figures for the era of Lenin and Stalin: • Thirteen million died in the Russian civil war...

...undermined Leninist totalitarianism by revealing the truth about the country and the world outside...

...Although barely literate, Brezhnev was the most amiable of the seven leaders...

...and that for all of his affecting spontaneity, he was in fact very calculating and prone to foul language as soon as the doors closed...

...Much new material is evident as well in Volkogonov's treatment of postwar Soviet deportations and forced labor camps, Stalin's role in the Korean War, his views on atomic weapons, his readiness to contemplate World War III, and the events surrounding his death...

...The chapters on Lenin and Stalin do not recapitulate the author's comprehensive biographies of the two, but concentrate on selected themes...

...Volkogonov fairly observes that historians might remember Brezhnev more kindly if not for those two crises, in which he was much less a leader than a tool of Kremlin hawks...

...but, he says, after listening to the "comrades"—practically all in favor—he had to agree with them...

...As millions were being fed by American relief agencies, from his sickbed Lenin demanded intensified surveillance of the relief workers...

...In my view, the documents should be turned into pulp (you should first find out how to do this technically...

...From 1917 on, at home and abroad, its intellectual leaders (whether from Christian, liberal Westernizing, Marxist, Russian populist, or anarchist premises) consistently predicted that Lenin's "experiment" would fail, and would offer the world only the negative example of how not to make a revolution, how not to create a socially just or happy society...

...Volkogonov insists, and millions of Russians always knew, that the Soviet regime was based on force and lies...

...Indeed, the documents make clear that at all times from 1953 to 1985 and beyond, Stalinists (both cautious-conservative and aggressive-reactionary) constituted the overwhelming majority of the Politburo and Central Committee...

...He goes on to tell of Khrushchev's failures in agriculture, the nearcompromise with Japan in 1956 on the Kuril Islands, the nuclear explosion near Chelyabinsk (1957), and the suppressed strike at Novocherkassk (1962...

...Such "blocking units," said Trotsky, offered conscripts the choice between "dying with honor at the front or with shame in the rear...

...The author is not as fond of Khrushchev as are some of the Soviet leader's surviving aides...

...he actually had personal friends whom he remembered and rewarded...

...already on page 4, we encounter this "new" note to his Commissar of Justice: "Is it not time to deal with the question of destroying [Lenin's emphasis] the title documents of private property...

...its contents have yet to resurface...

...As Volkogonov points out, both before and after 1985 Gorbachev achieved nothing in his chosen "field" of nomenklaturist oversight, agriculture...

...Lenin's subsequent war against Poland not only cost the Red Army 120,000 casualties but the cession of maj or territories (east of the "Curzon line" of ethnic division): "the population of this area was 6.75 million, of whom some 400,000 were Poles...

...and Khrushchev's personal crises in June 1957, when he was almost overthrown, and October 1964, when he finally was...

...He became more receptive to professional advice later in the War...

...The author's life and sterling character are illuminated in a Preface by Harold Shukman of St...

...For instance, we learn for the first time that, during World War II and as late as 1947, Brezhnev identified himself as Ukrainian by nationality (before choosing to be Russian as his Kremlin career prospered...

...There is new detail, for example, on German financing of Lenin and on Soviet funding of the "world Communist movement...

...One of the first acts of the emphysemic clerk Chernenko, upon succeeding the dissident-hunter Andropov as Party chief in 1984, was to restore Vyacheslav M. Molotov's Communist Party card...

...Prior to discussing the historic 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, Volkogonov describes, with some indignation, how Khrushchev engineered the arbitrary transfer of the Crimean peninsula from the Russian Republic to Ukraine...

...2 million others found refuge abroad...

...the 1982 CPSU "Food Program" he remains proud of now seems a bad joke...

...He drew heavily on them in this masterful account of the seven men who headed the CPSU: the two murderous revolutionaries, Lenin and Stalin...

...Seize [the property] first...

...and three conservative bureaucrats, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri V Andropov and Konstantin U. Chemenko...

...And "within the USSR, with the help of Aleksandr Yakovlev he initiated glasnost, which...

...The author's mood darkens when he contemplates the transcripts of the two Central Committee meetings (Decernber 1936, March 1937) that ushered in the slaughter of the Old Bolsheviks: "The record of these proceedings creates the appalling picture of an irrational world where common abuse served as a substitute for anything remotely approaching political debate...

...Under Stalin, wiretapping and electronic surveillance became allpervasive...

...Such is notably the case with the transcripts of Stalin's, and later Khrushchev's, conversations and correspondence with the Chinese leaders...

...His commission declassified some 78 million Politburo and other Communist Party files...

...by the time he died, the secret police also employed 11 million "voluntary" (nonstaff) informers...

...These dramatize how unusually cunning Stalin was, how incredibly hot-headed Khrushchev was, and what determined troublemakers both were in the international arena...

...The grimmest pages of Autopsy for an Empire cite documents on the "penal battalions" and "blocking units" deployed to stop further retreats...

...Between 1929 and 1953, the Soviet state "deprived 21.5 million Soviet citizens of their lives" (nearly half of them in the forced collectivization of agriculture...

...It was perhaps a unique example in history of the truth alone achieving what was beyond the power of a mighty state...

...Volkogonov gives Stalin credit for simplifying the jumble of Lenin's ideas into a readable 130 pages (Foundations of Leninism, 80 pp., Questions of Leninism, 50 pp...

...In addition to the familiar causes of Soviet defeats in 1941 (the Red Army purges, the pact with Hitler, the disregard of warnings), Volkogonov notes "flawed strategic thinking...

...He goes to greater pains to demonstrate from the internal documents that, in the 1989 controversy over the "secret protocols" to the Stalin-Hitler Pact partitioning East-Central Europe (turning for a time on the perceived authenticity of alleged "copies" vs...

...The author suggests that Lenin's fanatical pursuit of "world revolution" reflected doubts that his regime could otherwise survive...

...While the Chernobyl nuclear explosion was eventually cited as a landmark on the road to glasnost, Volkogonov shows that the Politburo's performance, and Gorbachev's own, during the crisis were disgraceful (as bad as the handling of the Korean airliner shoot-down three years earlier...

...Stalin also ordered a dubious offensive in the winter of 1941-42 that cost the Red Army 2,350,000 men...

...Shortly before his first stroke in March 1922, Lenin continued to insist that "it would be the biggest mistake to think that NEP [the permissive New Economic Policy] put an end to terror...

...It was as if these were not the leaders of a great state assembled in convocation, but a mob of criminals with no sense of civilized values or the basic norms of human relations...

...reaffirming not only "Leninism" but Stalin's "general line" ("strategic choice," in Gorbachev's words) of forced collectivization and breakneck industrialization...

...supposedly lost "originals"), Gorbachev was lying from start to finish...

...Volkogonov says that most of those executed had been in disorderly retreat "because of the loss of command structures at various levels," partly as a result of the arrests at Stalin's order of "dozens" of unsuccessful Soviet generals...

...Equally colorful is Volkogonov's account of the successive coups d'état in Afghanistan in 1978-79, based partly on his own experiences there as well as on interviews and documents...

...Politically, he most wanted "stability," peace and quiet in the country, consensus in the ruling hierarchy...

...As a Russian patriot, Volkogonov is offended by the Bolshevik capitulation to Germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, for in 1917 the Russian Army, despite widespread demoralization, had not really been defeated in the field (nor retreated as far as Mikhail I. Kutuzov in 1812 or Stalin in 1941...

...Later, Khrushchev's men purged the Party files of documents incriminating him in Stalin's terror...

...In 1987, when Gorbachev tried to revive Khrushchev's "de-Stalinization" campaign, he did so within the limits set in Khrushchev's day—i.e...

...No review of conventional length can do justice to the scope and resonance of Volkogonov's disclosures...

...There is something new on virtually every page—and, on some pages, in nearly every paragraph...

...And Volkogonov provides some authoritative statistics...

...He points out wryly, though, that this was not because Stalin set out to make Lenin's turgid ideas more accessible, but because Stalin himself thought that way, in schematic, dogmatic, binary terms...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope," "The New Russian Tragedy" As a military historian, biographer of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and chairman of a Russian parliamentary commission in 1992-93, the late General Dmitri Volkogonov did more than any other person to disclose the secrets of the Soviet regime between 1917 and 1991...

...The triumph of that awful truth owed much to the resilience and resistance of the Russian intelligentsia...

...others were shot without trial...

...After citing an official count of Third World projects launched under Khrushchev— more than 6,000—the chapter concludes with fascinating information on the various stages of the quarrel with China...

...Brezhnev's yielding leadership style is conveyed in the transcript of a 1964 Politburo discussion about whether to mark Stalin's upcoming birthday anniversary (December 21) with an article in Pravda...

...When that day finally came, Lavrenti P. Beria alone got to Stalin's personal safe...

...In 1941 and 1942, he reports, more than 157,000 men were sentenced to death for desertion, malingering and the like...

...One can only weep for the 60 million who lost their lives...